cold fjord writes: Break out the tin foil hats, and make them double thick. Fortune reports, "The NSA will soon cut the ribbon on a facility in Utah... the center will be up and running by the “end of the fiscal year,”....Brewster Kahle is the engineering genius behind the Internet Archive,... Kahle estimates that a space of that size could hold 10,000 racks of servers.... “So we are talking $1 billion in machines.” Kahle estimates each rack would be capable of storing 1.2 petabytes of data.... all the phone calls made in the U.S. in a year would take up about 272 petabytes,... If Kahle’s estimations and assumptions are correct, the facility could hold up to 12,000 petabytes, or 12 exabytes –... but is not of the scale previously reported. Previous estimates would allow the data center to easily hold hypothetical 24-hour video and audio recordings of every person in the United States for a full year. The data center’s capacity as calculated by Kahle would only allow the NSA to create Beyonce-style archives for the 13 million people living in the Los Angeles metro area. Even that reduced number struck Internet infrastructure expert Paul Vixie as high given the space allocated for data in the facility.... he came up with an estimate of less than 3 exabytes of data capacity for the facility. That would only allow for 24-hour recordings of what every one of Philadelphia’s 1.5 million residents was up to for a year. Still, he says that’s a lot of data pointing to a 2009 article about Google planning multiple data centers for a single exabyte of info. "